A spokesman for Russian energy giant Gazprom said on Monday that a NATO demining device was discovered on the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline in 2015, Reuters reports.

Press secretary Serhiy Kupriyanov said that the device was recovered and neutralized by the armed forces of Sweden.

In 2015, during an inspection of the Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline conducted by Gazprom specialists, an underwater mine disposal device was discovered, which, as NATO later stated, “was lost during some exercises,” Sergey Kupriyanov said on Monday . , quoted by the official Russian press agency TASS, reports Agerpres.

“This case is well-known. On November 6, 2015, during a scheduled visual inspection of the Nord Stream-1 gas pipeline, a NATO Sea Fox underwater vehicle was discovered. It was located in the space between the gas pipelines, apparently near one of the branches,” the spokesman for Gazprom told the Russia TV channel -24.

“NATO said that an underwater trigger was lost during some exercises. These are NATO exercises where a military explosive device is planted directly under our gas pipeline,” Kupriyanov added.

Kupriyanov also claims that the device was pulled out of the water and neutralized by the Swedish armed forces, and gas transportation, interrupted by the incident, was later restored.

A Swedish investigation said initial inspections at the site of the gas leak from the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea confirmed suspicions of sabotage through “detonations” that caused “significant damage”.

Swedish Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Monday that Sweden will not share the results of an investigation into the Nord Stream gas pipeline explosions with Russian authorities or Gazprom, Reuters reported.

“In Sweden, our preliminary investigations are confidential, and that of course also applies to this case,” she told reporters.

Last week, Russian Prime Minister Mykhailo Mishustin sent a letter to the Swedish government demanding that the Russian government and Gazprom be involved in the investigation, which Sweden refused.

However, Andersson said that Sweden does not have the authority to ban Russian ships from visiting the blast sites now that the investigation at the scene has been completed.

“The Swedish economic zone is not an area that Sweden owns. Now we have removed the borders and other ships can stay in the zone, that’s the rules,” she said.

The German Prosecutor General’s Office has also begun an investigation into the explosions that occurred on the Russian Nord Stream pipeline.